Hello, everybody! It's been a while since I've shared a proper review of a 1980s slasher. Things have been real busy on my end, writing for Screen Rant full time and all. I have a tentative plan to get Census Bloodbath back up and running some point by spring 2025, but before then, please enjoy this review of a snowy slasher I watched as part of my duties at Horror Press.
Director: Jeff Kwitney
Cast: Debra De Liso, Doug Stevenson, Lisa Loring
Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes
Plot: In Iced, four years after their friend Jeff (Dan Smith of Hitcher in the Dark) dies in a skiing accident, a group of friends is invited to the swanky Snow Peak skiing community for a vacation. Isolated and surrounded by snow, they begin to be hunted by a killer wearing Jeff's cracked ski mask who blames them for the accident. Is it Jeff? Or is it someone else seeking revenge?
The characters in question are Cory (Doug Stevenson of The Prowler), whose braggadocio and stealing of Jeff's girlfriend caused Jeff to go angry-skiing during a storm in the first place; Trina (Debra De Liso of The Slumber Party Massacre), said former girlfriend and now wife of Cory, who is obsessed with exercise; pediatrician John (John C. Cooke); John's resentful wife Diane (Elizabeth Gorcey); Jeanette (Lisa Loring, the original onscreen Wednesday Addams, also of Blood Frenzy), their transparently desperate single friend who just had a blow-out fight with her dorky boyfriend Eddie (Michael Picardi); and Carl (Ron Kologie of Cards of Death), the requisite irritating prankster who has the additional character trait of being addicted to drugs, aided by his high-paying job at a pharmaceutical company. Also on hand is the allegedly hunky Snow Peak real estate agent Alex Bourne (Joseph Alan Johnson, who wrote Iced in addition to starring in Berserker and The Slumber Party Massacre), who is desperate to impress his father and who Jeanette immediately throws herself at.
Analysis: Unfortunately, like a lot of meat-and-potatoes slasher movies of the late 1980s, Iced does not have much to offer the seasoned horror fan. The acting ranges from competent (hi, Lisa Loring) to absolutely abysmal, averaging out much closer to abysmal than not. Joseph Alan Johnson in particular is a disastrously beige nonentity.
The movie’s pacing and structure are also baffling. There are almost no murders beyond the opening kill for a good half of Iced’s runtime, which forces you to spend time watching this group of people have a pretty mediocre ski vacation where they’re constantly sniping at one another and not doing much else. When the kills do come, they zip past you at a too-rapid clip, hardly giving you time to pay proper attention to them, like chocolates on the conveyor belt in I Love Lucy.
There is next to no tension-building in the movie because of this, just a lurching sort of stop-start motion that will make you seasick. By far the most exciting and visceral moment of the movie is a scene where a character is wandering around in the dark and bangs his shin on a coffee table. Tragically, the skiing is also not that thrilling to watch. While it’s competently shot, enough to be legible, it seems to be beyond the limits of director Jeff Kwitney to turn it into something propulsive and exciting. Thankfully, the movie pretty much forgets about skiing after the first act, anyway.
Although the sum of its parts is pure blandness, there is plenty that Iced does quite well. For instance, the movie was shot in Utah and thus comes by its iciness naturally (sorry, Jack Frost, California doesn’t quite cut it), crafting a unique setting for a late-period slasher with a frigid, moody atmosphere. I’m also a sucker for themed kills, and the use of a ski pole, an icicle, a snowplow, and a hot tub do a lot to spice up the proceedings.
For the gorehounds in the audience, only one of the kills is particularly bloody, though they are nearly all well-rendered by their own standards (there’s an electrocution that relies on performance rather than effects, for instance, and does stick the landing). And even the offscreen or underwhelming kills end up being useful in the Final Girl sequence, when their frozen bodies provide a gruesome and effectively bleak tableau.
As far as exploitation movies go, Iced also has quite a bit to offer on that front. Nearly every member of the cast takes off all their clothes at one point or another, chilliness be damned, and there is a reasonably equitable division of male and female characters wandering around bare-chested, which always feels shockingly progressive when you’re watching a 1980s slasher. Plus, the sequence that is the most undignified (a topless corpse is seen with snow piled on her breasts) actually works for the tone, as the indignity makes her death feel that much more tragic, while the piled snow emphasizes how impossibly long the character has been exposed to the elements.
What else is good? Well… The killer’s POV is depicted by showing a view through the crack’s in Jeff’s visor, which provides a neat new image for a type of shot that is otherwise pretty standard for a slasher movie.
However, Iced ultimately exists in this nether space between interesting and boring where it never particularly feels like a slog, but is oh so withholding when it comes to meting out exciting moments. I’ve seen dozens of slashers that are much, much worse, so it’s hard to get angry about what this 1988 entry is bringing to the table. That said, this one is only for die hard fans of the subgenre, or for people who desperately need a snowy horror fix and have already seen everything else from The Shining to Wind Chill.
Killer: Alex Bourne (Joseph Alan Johnson)
Final Girl: Trina (Debra De Liso)
Best Kill: John getting stabbed through the back of the neck with a ski pole while sitting in the car evokes Halloween in a fun way, is the best themed kill, and is also the most showstopping gore moment, simultaneously.
Sign of the Times: A man who is supposed to be inconspicuous is seen wearing a red headband over a teased blond mullet.
Scariest Moment: The killer is seen reflected in a makeup mirror while one of the characters is standing at the bathroom counter.
Weirdest Moment: Jeanette and Alex share an intimate conversation while lying in front of the fireplace and start hardcore making out, after which point it is revealed that everybody else is still in the room with them, and has been the whole time.
Champion Dialogue: "I didn't have any tits hardly, and I was terrified my secret would be discovered."
Body Count: 7
- Jeff dies in a skiing accident after falling on some rocks.
- Eddie is run over with a snowplow.
- John is stabbed through the back of the neck with a ski pole.
- Diana is stabbed in the eye with an icicle offscreen.
- Jeanette is electrocuted in a hot tub.
- Carl has both feet caught in bear traps and dies somehow.
- Alex is kicked out of a window and shot simultaneously.
TL;DR: Iced is bland but hardly the worst slasher out there, mostly thanks to its unique snowy setting.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1222